The Ride of your life (literally) and more with the Google Assistant at CES 2019.

Deeplocal was the creative concepting and technology partner to Google on their 2019 Consumer Electronics Show experience, including the spectacular centerpiece: The Google Assistant Ride.

Challenge

After a major win at last year’s conference, the team wanted to continue to revolutionize CES in 2019, and to hero the Google Assistant in a remarkable, unexpected way.

Strategy

Google is a brand built on helpfulness–we all know the feeling of turning to Google for help during life’s happily hectic moments. That’s what sparked our idea of creating an amusement park-style ride: a delightful, relatable experience for everyone that would bring that story to life.

Execution

Working alongside Google, we concepted, designed, and engineered The Google Assistant Ride. It was a real ride, complete with animatronic characters, train cars, photo ops, and its own song. While in line for The Ride, guests were greeted by an animatronic Grandma character who interacted and spoke with them via live puppeteering. Once on board, Riders traveled through a day in the life of an animatronic Dad, who relied on help from the Assistant. Deeplocal created a triggering system to integrate the in-car audiovisual experience with the exterior scenery. We also engineered all of the animatronics, which were up to 11 feet tall.

Elsewhere in the Google Assistant Playground, we created an interactive diorama that helped guests recognize all the ways that the Assistant can help at home, in the car and on-the-go on a phone. We also brought back winners from the 2018 conference, such as the giant Google Gumball Machine. Guests drew custom posters with Poster Maker, the voice-activated robot artist.
CES attendees, the press, and social media were all buzzing about Google’s Playground, especially The Ride. TechCrunch said it best: “The work and engineering that went into this — and the quality of what they built for something that’ll only be here for a few days — is seriously absurd.”